Washington in Disarray

Capt. Charles Francis Adams Jr., grandson and great-grandson of presidents and son of the current minister to Britain, arrived in Washington on Aug. 27, 1862. His regiment, the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, had been hastily snatched from its operations on the South Carolina coast and shipped north to meet the emergency created by Gen. Robert E. Lee’s stunning counteroffensive after the failure of the Union’s Peninsula campaign. Adams knew the capital city well, and was appalled by its “atmosphere of treason, jealousy, and dissension” — more than usual, given the recriminations pouring forth as federal forces retreated.

Thirty miles to the southwest, Gen. John Pope’s Army of Virginia was beginning its disastrous struggle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in what would be known as the Second Battle of Bull Run. But what appalled Adams was not the impending defeat, but the deep and bitter antagonism between the officers of the Army of the Potomac and the Lincoln administration.

The officers, under Gen. George B. McClellan, told Adams that Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and the Radicals who supported him, had deliberately tried to sacrifice the Army to destroy or discredit their commander and boost Pope as his successor. Administration supporters responded in kind, accusing McClellan and his clique of deliberately stalling the war effort out of sympathy with the South. Stanton and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase were circulating a petition among members of the cabinet calling for McClellan’s court-martial – Chase thought McClellan should be shot as a conscious traitor.

Library of CongressGen. George B. McClellan

“The air of this city seems thick with treachery; our army seems in danger of utter demoralization,” Adams wrote to his father. “Everything is ripe for a terrible panic, the end of which I cannot even imagine.” It requires, he said, “good courage not to despair of the republic.”

The crisis had begun early in July, when Lincoln realized that the war could not be won without a radical change of strategy. The South’s willingness and ability to maintain the conflict could not be broken without larger and more energetic military offensives. Nor could the war be won without a direct attack on the institution of slavery, which was the basis of the South’s political cohesion and economic strength. Indeed, as Lincoln saw it, the long, bloody war that was now in prospect could not be justified unless slavery, the root cause of the conflict, were removed.

Lincoln had therefore decided to issue a proclamation emancipating all slaves in rebel-held territory. But he could not act until his armies won a military victory – otherwise his deeply principled decision would seem merely an act of desperation. By that summer, it seemed clear to him that one of the obstacles to that victory was McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac – and also the symbolic leader of the political opposition.

McClellan was notoriously averse to rapid, aggressive action. Despite repeated orders from the president and General-in-Chief Henry W. Halleck, he refused to advance against Lee’s army defending Richmond, Va. McClellan’s popularity with his soldiers made it difficult to remove him from command. So Lincoln and Halleck chose to transfer his army piecemeal back to Washington, mostly by transporting them by ship, leaving control of the front to General Pope and his Army of Virginia. McClellan, though still the titular head of the Army of the Potomac, was relegated to the operational sidelines. It was a terrible blunder. While McClellan’s troops were at sea, Lee was able to concentrate his whole force against the hapless Pope.

From his first appointment to high command, McClellan had toyed with the idea of a “dictatorship,” albeit one not seized by coup but granted by an act of Congress. When that possibility faded, he politicked incessantly to force Lincoln to fire Secretary Stanton and accept McClellan as the dominant voice in military affairs. He considered himself the one man chosen by Divine Providence to save the republic: “I have no choice,” he told his wife, “the people call upon me to save the country – I must save it & cannot respect anything that stands in the way.” He took pleasure in telling his wife, “I have commenced receiving letters from the North urging me to march on Washington & assume the Govt!!”

While Lee’s campaign was developing, McClellan waged a war in the press against Stanton and Pope. He looked forward to the destruction of Pope’s army as a judgment of God against those “dolts at Washington” who are “bent on my destruction.” Once Pope was defeated, McClellan thought Halleck would have to restore him to full command. “I know that with God’s help I can save them,” but he would refuse to do so unless they granted him “full & entire control.” If his “coup,” as he called it, was successful, “everything will be changed in this country so far as we are concerned & my enemies will be at my feet. It may go hard with some of them in that event, for I look upon them as the enemies of the country & of the human race . . . [If] I succeed my foot will be on their necks.” Fitz-John Porter, McClellan’s closest confidant, wrote to a friend: “Would that this army was in Washington to rid us of incumbents ruining our country.”

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From Aug. 27 to 30, while Pope’s army was fighting and dying at Manassas, McClellan was in the Washington area, in charge of the two corps just arrived from Virginia. Despite repeated orders from Halleck, he refused to send reinforcements to Pope. He caviled, he stalled, he gave orders and then recalled them; at one point he declared it was better to “let Pope get out of his scrape as best he can” and save his own troops to defend Washington. Chase and Stanton called his actions treason. Even Lincoln thought them “unforgiveable.”

As Pope’s defeated troops filtered back into Washington, the Lincoln administration faced its worst crisis yet. The choices were grim. Pope’s defeat forced Lincoln to delay the Emancipation Proclamation indefinitely. Worse, the only general who could pull the Union Army together was the one man most adamantly opposed to everything Lincoln wanted – a man who would do things his own way, or not at all – a man who continually flirted with the idea of dictatorship. And to put him in command, Lincoln would have to defy his strongest cabinet ministers, Chase and Stanton, who thought McClellan should be shot as a traitor. But he did so on Sept. 2, by putting he put McClellan in charge of a reorganized Army of the Potomac that incorporated the remnants of Pope’s Army of Virginia. The next day, Washington learned that Lee’s forces had invaded Maryland. McClellan set off to confront them.

Lincoln ran the gravest risks by reappointing McClellan to command. If McClellan failed to repel Lee’s invasion, the administration might be repudiated by voters in the coming mid-term elections. If McClellan succeeded, his prestige would be enormous, and he was bound to use it to overthrow Secretary of War Stanton and gain control of military policy.

Even as his army was advancing toward its confrontation with Lee at Antietam, McClellan’s officers were using leaks to selected reporters to demand Stanton’s removal and threaten a “countermarch on Washington” if Lincoln did not give way to McClellan. As it happened, the Emancipation Proclamation provoked such anger at McClellan’s headquarters that one reporter believed “a fearful revolution” was imminent, “that will startle the Country and give us a Military Dictator” and “a change of dynasty.”

Lincoln’s decision to put McClellan in command required immense moral courage, and an intelligent recognition of military necessity. He accepted the risks and the political blowback because he understood that McClellan was the only general who could lead the army against Lee, with a chance to win the victory he needed in order to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. As he would later say to another would-be Napoleon, “What I now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The risk was serious. But Lincoln did not (as Captain Adams feared) “despair of the republic.” He trusted the strength of the nation’s republican institutions, its people’s commitment to the Constitution – and his own ability to use those strengths effectively.

Lincoln had also taken the measure of his opponent. Experience had taught him that, when faced with the necessity of battle, McClellan “became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.” When it came to staging a coup, such a man might load the gun, but he would never pull the trigger.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.